The book is about a fourteen year old girl named Melinda who is struggling to get through her freshman year of high school. From the very beginning she has low expectations of a good time and simply wants to get through the year in peace. She is extremely unpopular due to something that happened at a party (that isn't explained in detail until nearly the end of the book), and along with that she suffers greatly from depression and has a hard time keeping her grades up, getting invested in school activities, and making any friends and maintaining relationships with people, including her own parents. About halfway through the book it is revealed that she was raped at a party over the summer by an upperclassman and wound up calling the police without actually explaining what happened, causing many of the people at the party to get in trouble and even arrested, which ended many friendships for her as well as plummeted her reputation. She is unable to speak out about it until the very end, when one of her ex friends starts dating her rapist and Melinda tries to warn her. She is not believed until her rapist tries to attack her again for "spreading rumors" about him. The book ends with her finally being able to open up a bit more after all of this has come to light.
I thought the book was... okay. Almost good. A solid 6 out of 10. I didn't mind the subject matter, and in fact applaud the author for taking on such a taboo subject especially during a time in which it was rarely talked about, let alone taken seriously (the book was published in 1999, and only now are movements against sexual assault becoming acknowledged by mainstream media). However, I think the book failed its target audience. For a problem novel about sexual assault and rape, it hardly ever talked about the problem. This is not to say that I think Anderson should have written an intense and graphic rape scene or anything like that; I just think that if I were to seek this book out as a high schooler looking for comfort after being assaulted, I would have been disappointed, if not completely disheartened. Melinda spends the entire book suffering. We, the audience, don't know the root of her problem until three-fourths of the way in, and her problem doesn't even come close to being "solved" at all. While she is finally able to speak out about what happened at the end, we don't actually see any of her friends try to reconnect with her or apologize to her, we don't see her parents try to console her or comfort her, and we don't even know whether or not her rapist received any form of punishment. While it is implied that she's going to be okay in the future, we are simply told that, not shown it. Melinda gets absolutely no time to heal or recover from what happened to her. Rape and sexual assault victims know damn well what it feels like to hurt and have no one to go to after the fact, and while they may appreciate the mirror of seeing a fictional character walk in their shoes, it hurts to see only that and not get a happy ending. While it may be "realistic" for this book to not have a clean, concise happy ending, I think this is the one of the few subject matters that really, truly needs that. Victims of sexual assault know just how likely it is for their stories to end unhappily. Most rapists are never convicted, most victims won't come forward due to fear or more attacks and the likelihood that no one will believe them, and the chances of developing depression or PTSD or other forms of mental illness because of the trauma are extremely high. With all of that weighing on their minds, they would likely seek out books where people like them, people who have gone through the same trauma they have, can overcome it, have time to heal and have people to support them. This book didn't have that, and if I had read it in high school when I was in need of comfort, I would have only felt even more hopeless.
Along with that, I think the book is almost condescending to its readers. The target audience is adolescents, leaning more towards high school age readers. The main character is fourteen, most all of the novel takes place in a high school, and when the book isn't talking about Melinda's trauma (which is hardly ever), it is talking about life as a high schooler. However, the author who wrote this was an adult. And I'm not saying that adults can't write realistic portrayals of high school students, it's just that Anderson... did not. It felt like she didn't try that hard; in fact, in the back of the book where she answered interview questions, when asked how she researched what high school students were like, she said that she'd go to the Taco Bell at the mall and listen to the teens around her talk. That's it. That answer, quite frankly, horrified me. I can't imagine thinking so little of your target audience that you rely on gossip and stereotypes of what teens are like to base your serious novel about rape off of. Before I had known this book was written in 1999, I genuinely though the author had watched Mean Girls on repeat to write her characters. Nearly every character in this was a stereotype of some kind. Heather, Melinda's only friend for awhile, is a nobody who wants to join the popular girls who call themselves "The Marthas", she describes all the other students, including her ex-friends as jocks or geeks or European obsessed hipsters or whatever and it just felt so forced and fake. Rather than focus on Melinda and her trauma and how she copes with it, most all of the story seemed to be Melinda critiquing what most high schoolers are like. I usually don't mind that - I've never met a high schooler who didn't have some critiques about the students around them, myself included - however, it just felt so... pointless in this story. It felt like Anderson was trying her hardest to make sure the audience knew that this was in a high school, and her only way of doing that was to rip every student aside from Melinda of their humanity and simply make them walking caricatures of what bitter adults think those bratty teens are like. I know I sound harsh and I apologize for that, but it was exceedingly clear that Anderson didn't take her audience seriously. What really did it for me was that near the beginning, Melinda attends a pep rally and while watching the cheerleaders do their routine, she thinks about how they all must be sluts who have sex with the football team on the weekends and she wonders how they manage to look like pristine virgins by the beginning of the school week. She also continues to say that she bets that they all get group rate abortions before prom together. That's.... a horrible thing to have your main character, a victim of rape, say. While slut-shaming is exceedingly common in high school settings, I just simply can't imagine a victim of rape slut-shaming other girls like that. Being raped or sexually assaulted completely changes your perception of sex entirely. You tend not to call other girls sluts or whores or loose or anything like that and think critically of people who do, because you likely know from experience just how quickly the notion that you are a slut who will sleep with anyone will be used against you and invalidate anything you say if you try to speak out about assault. Anderson was so focused on making sure her book felt teen™ enough that she didn't bother to think about the fact that teens are still people and that they don't all think and act the same as what stereotypes you hear on T.V. and gossip you hear at the mall tells you. It was really upsetting and while reading this it was an immediate red flag that perhaps Anderson doesn't take her target audience nor the subject of sexual assault that seriously if she can't even stop her victim protagonist from being a slut-shaming misogynist. It seemed to imply that Melinda, specifically, deserves better but those other girls? What sluts! It was a horrible, though I'm guessing unintentional, message for a book about rape.
The major themes in this story are sexual assault, isolation, coping and eventual bravery. The story is about Melinda coping after being raped at a party. However, as the truth of what happened to her doesn't become apparent until near the end of the book, the story predominately focuses on her isolation. After the incident at the party, she has no friends to rely on. Along with that, she grows more and more silent, much to the annoyance of her parents. Rather than think about what happened to her, she copes by isolating herself and remaining silent, hoping to get through high school and the trauma by keeping it all to herself. However, finally, at the very end she confesses what happened to her when her ex friend starts dating her rapist. While she is not believed at first and initially regrets even trying to speak out, it took immense bravery of her to do so, and she is eventually believed.
I think the book's main message, despite taking so long to get to it, was that victims of assault should speak out about it. While it is painful to do so and while it may seem like no one will want to hear or believe what you have to say, being able to talk to someone can potentially stop the assailant from committing more crimes, and it can also help lead you down the road of recovery. I think. For a problem novel, this book took quite a long time to get to the actual problem, and because of that it's kind of hard to determine what the main message is. It felt like most of the message is that everyone in high school is a stupid brat except for the main character, which is a common theme in most high school books but usually isn't the main message. I guess another message is that you shouldn't believe rumors or think badly of people when you don't know their reasoning for things, (for example, all of Melinda's friends started to hate her for calling the cops at the party, when if they had just heard her side of the story they would have known she had a reason for it), but we are shown that perspective from the get go, so it seems more obvious than a message that must be taught. I guess since the book is called Speak, the whole moral of the story is to speak out about trauma and misdeeds.
Despite my many critiques of this story, I still think this story is important. I think the author could have done a better job writing a story about sexual assault from the perspective of teens, but this is still a good start considering that the subject of rape and sexual assault isn't touched upon at all in school. It is simply not taken seriously and though I'm still bitter that this book didn't focus on the problem as much as I wished it had, bringing awareness to such a taboo subject is still a good thing. Sexual assault isn't taken seriously in both high school as well as in the adult world. Victims' stories are hardly told, and when they are they are not believed and asked horrible, invasive questions like what they were wearing, if they had led their attacker on, if they were drunk, etc. Though I still believe this wasn't the best telling of a rape victim's story, it helped that none of those biases were there when it came to Melinda's story. The author never set it up to seem like it Melinda's fault. She never did anything wrong and it was clear from the start that it was her attacker's fault. I'm still mad that slut shaming did extend to other characters in the stories ([thirty year old mother voice] all those cheerleaders are such sluts guys, am I right......... that's how the teens talk, right? Girls liking one another? Impossible!) but this book was still a good start in letting rape victims know that their assault wasn't their fault, that they should speak out about what happened to them, and that they aren't alone. Now if only the book had told Melinda, and by extension other rape victims, that she'd get to heal and be all right, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment